The trend for metaliterature in Hispanism arrived in the 1980s and was practically orthodoxy in the 1990s. Kronik saw Galdós as self-reflexive, using El amigo Manso but also other novels. Kronik gave NEH seminars, which spread his ideas across the country. Gustavo Pérez Firmat looked at Spanish experimental novels of the 1920s (Idle Fictions, 1982). My late colleague Bob Spires wrote some books on the subject, inspired by Kronik but without Kronik's critical verve (Beyond the Metafictional Mode, Transparent Simulacra). I did my part with The Poetics of Self-Consciousness (1994). I don't tend to re-read my old work, but I think it was a good book and it has been amply cited. My first book was on poetic self-consciousness too (Claudio Rodríguez). There was Jill Robbin's book on Carnero, etc...
If the theme seems stale now, it is because we flogged it to death. Also, if we see the crest of the wave as 1979, the year of both Mulligan Stew and If on a Winter's Night, then it stands to reason that the following decades would see the most amount of criticism. This was also the heyday of postmodern literature, before postmodernism was coopted by Lyotard to mean something completely different.
I never really stopped working on this, but my emphasis shifted. You can study poetics, as the embodied poetic theory of a major poet, without studying poems that talk explicitly about being poems. Meta gets boring, in other words (Juarroz).
3 comments:
Wasn't it always boring? I hated Niebla for this reason as an undergraduate, found it torpe and self-important; hated all the Saura films that reminded us they were films; all of this seemed to pretentious and dull and seemed like devices to dress up bad work as clever.
Maybe. I reacted to Nieba badly too, as undergraduate. I thought it was just done in too obvious a way.
Too obvious, yes. I almost taught it this semester because I thought I had to, but desisted.
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